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When is a door not a door? In the case
of Ndebele Funeral, Zoe Martinson's new play for the New York based
Smoke and Mirrors Collaborative company it's when it's a coffin. Set
in the Soweto townships which huge swathes of South Africa's black
community still call home, a city sickness hangs heavy over Thandi's
shack, where she is woken from her slumber, first by a government
inspector looking into how she has used the wood allocated to improve
her housing situation, then by old college friend Mandisi, whose
enthusiasm for twenty-first century pop culture fails to bring Thandi
back to being the woman she was before her self-imposed exile.

With Martinson herself playing Thandi,
Awoye Timpo's production of her play exposes a loss of faith, not
just in Mandisi's sullied devotion to something higher, but more
devastatingly in Thandi's wilful self-destruction that is her last
gasp for autonomy in her poverty-stricken existence. With the
naturalism of each scene broken up by ebullient bursts of South
African song, gumboot dancing and out-front monologues, Martinson,
Yusef Miller as Mandisi and Jonathan David Martin as the inspector
reveal a moving but no less troubling portrait of a post apartheid
South Africa where for some life is still very much on the edge

In Can I Start Again Please, two women
sit formally side by side wearing frocks ornate enough to suggest
they're about to give some polite parlour room recitation. With pages
of text spread out on their laps like a musical score, on one level
that's exactly what Sue MacLaine's fifty-five minute meditation on
how words fail us becomes. As MacLaine and co-performer Nadia
Nadarajah relate untranslatable quotes from Wittgenstein both in
everyday English and in sign language with coded references to
childhood sexual abuse peppered throughout, something darker and more
philosophical emerges.

Part performance lecture, part unspoken
interrogation of the audience and part purging, MacLaine's piece
plays with form as much as content in a production overseen by
Jonathan Burrows, described as an outside eye rather than a director.
Provocations on what it means to be silent are punctuated by
choreographed hand gestures or else Maclaine and Nadrajah ringing
hand-bells that only one of them will hear. Wry intellectual gags are
delivered in precise, deadpan tones. Even the lack of a question mark
in the title seems to be a line of inquiry that goes beyond words to
get to a stark and mesmeric dissection of actions that speak a whole
lot louder.

When a girl with a magic heart meets a
boy with stars in his eyes in Fable, the fact that they were brought
together in a West of Scotland village by a dating app rather than
fate suggests that opposites attracting in such a way might not quite
work out. J is a would-be astronaut grounded by physical limits not
of her making. Blair is a small-town boy who'll never get out of town
if he's not careful, even though he's too careful by far. As it is,
through a series of everyday epiphanies, each opens the other up to
infinite possibilities, and they both learn how to soar.

The fact that The Flanagan Collective's
lo-fi austerity age rom-com manages to go stratospheric using little
more than looped guitar patterns played live by Jim Harbourne, who
plays Blair, an old-school what-we-did-on-our-hols slideshow and a
series of spoken-word style monologues from Veronica Hare as J makes
Joe Hufton's production even more charming. There's something quietly
anarchic about the show's call to arms to rise above hi-tech led
consumer culture and to be everything you want to be. With Harbourne
and Hare sparking off each other with a mix of dynamism and
vulnerability, whatever the risks it seems to say, the possibilities
are endless.

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About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.